Nova Scotia’s Environment Minister is ordering Northern Pulp to produce more information and complete a full environmental assessment before he will approve the mill’s proposed wastewater treatment plant and a pipeline bringing the effluent from the plant to the Northumberland Strait. The project will replace a 50-year-old polluting system that dumps into Boat Harbour that […]
No federal assessment will be required for Northern Pulp’s proposed effluent treatment project
Yesterday, four days before his announcement was due on the Northern Pulp effluent treatment proposal, and less than 24 hours before the deadline for the provincial environment minister to announce his decision, federal Environment and Climate Change Minister Jonathan Wilkinson released a statement saying that he had “decided not to designate the Northern Pulp project […]
Child care workers go round and round with bus complaints
Morning File, Friday, September 20, 2019
News 1. Blackface Writes El Jones: When the furor over Trudeau’s Blackface photos dies down, to be referred to as an “embarrassing incident” or “controversial,” Black people like Abdilahi Elmi will still be facing deportation. Muslim Canadians will still be on the no-fly list. White nationalist editorials will still be commissioned by major newspapers under […]
How many adults looked the other way as children in their care were being sexually abused?
Morning File, Thursday, August 8, 2019
News 1. Patrick McNutt This item contains accounts of sexual abuse of children. A police release from yesterday: Investigators with the Special Investigation Section of the Integrated Criminal Investigative Division have laid additional charges against a man in relation to multiple historical sexual assaults that occurred in the 1970s and 80s. Investigators have charged Michael […]
Department of Environment slams Northern Pulp’s environmental assessment as “insufficient”
Paper Excellence Canada’s actions suggest maybe it never intended to operate Northern Pulp past 2020.
The Nova Scotia Department of Environment has listed nine pages worth of missing information from Northern Pulp’s Environmental Assessment of a new wastewater treatment system to replace the 50-year-old one at Boat Harbour next to the Pictou landing First Nation. The missing information is required to fulfil the “terms and conditions” of a focus report […]
Environment Minister Margaret Miller isn’t talking about Northern Pulp’s much-criticized environmental assessment
Morning File, Friday, March 15, 2019
News 1. Spill at Moose River gold mine “Atlantic Gold’s manager of environment and permitting, James Millard, calls it a ‘spill’ or a ‘loss of control’ caused by a ‘gasket failure,’” reports Joan Baxter: By whatever name, the event happened on the night of January 3, 2019, at the company’s open pit gold mine at […]
Northern Pulp’s environmental assessment “is simply not credible” says EAC
Morning File, Wednesday, March 13, 2019
News 1. Pulp Culture We’ve published Linda Pannozzo’s detailed review of how through the decades the province has oriented forest policies — and purposefully subverted science — to favour the pulp industry over the lumber industry. As a result, overcutting has resulted in smaller trees that provide less lumber, and now the sawmills are […]
Dalhousie researcher breaks silence over pulp mill’s cancer-causing air emissions
Dalhousie University researcher Emma Hoffman has come forward to defend her 2017 ambient air quality study about cancer-causing air emissions detected near the Northern Pulp mill after finding that her study was “misrepresented” in the mill’s recently registered Environmental Assessment [EA] for its proposed effluent treatment facility. In Part 3 of the “Dirty Dealing” series, I […]
Northern Pulp’s environmental documents: missing mercury, a pulp mill that never was, and oodles of contradictions
Cover photo: “Point D,” where treated Northern Pulp wastewater currently flows from Boat Harbour into the Northumberland Strait, just a few hundred metres from Pictou Landing First Nation. There is much to wade through in the documents Northern Pulp submitted to Nova Scotia Environment on February 7, 2019, when it registered its “Replacement Effluent Treatment […]